Dark Hero Party has all the puzzle pieces to make a fantastic game, but once they're all put together, you realize that the complete picture looked like shit the entire time.
That said, if a talented developer and artist were to take this game apart, they could make this into a god-tier game in only a few months, I'm certain of that. Despite not actually being a good game, it’s actually surprisingly close to greatness.
What would those talented devs and artists have to do? Let's start with...
1. Mediocre Art
A lot of people have been praising this game's art, and held it as a reason to keep playing. I'm a professional artist myself here, so you can call me out for punching down, but I can tell that the art here was not only rushed, but is just overall mediocre. There’s a good reason for this too, this is a Japanese game made by a company that seems to hire artists. The artist gets a quota, paid for the quota, and their motive is to finish what they were paid to draw as fast as they can. You’re not getting that artist at their best; you’re getting their bare minimum.
The penises are literally the worst I've seen in any game I've ever played. Whoever drew those? I think you need to get yourself checked out buddy. The vulvas often look great, but the art overall is low to mid-tier at best. U-ROOMs newer cames look phenomenal compared to this one.
3/5 on Art
2. Boring, Poorly Paced Gameplay
This game is an 'Illusion' of an RPG, that just wastes time. This is an RPGmaker game, but is it an RPG? No, not at all. This game merely uses the idea of an RPG as a vehicle to tell its story. Problem is, it gets bogged down with all the mediocre elements you'd come to expect from a bad RPGMaker game. Extremely slow pacing, combined with tons of random battles, in large aimless maps. This is especially annoying since in 95% of battles there's no chance of you losing, so you're just spamming enter, over and over and over.
There was this one sequence where the solution was such mind-bogglingly bad game design, I couldn't believe I had to do it, but effectively the only way to progress was to kill all 12ish random enemies wandering around three entire map areas.
By the time the game gets 'hard' and the game expects you to play it, you'll be burnt out enough that if you're like me, you'll just skip the combat with a cheat tool.
I like using gameplay as a tool to tell a story, and there are some parts where it really works, like when your weak main character gets swapped out with the rival chad, and you get to see their difference in power not only narratively but mechanically. Still…
2/5 on Gameplay
3. Inconsistent 'Skip' button.
If you're writing a story with long scenes, you better damn well have a working skip button. 'Shift', only worked 5% of the time. I'll admit, the story started on a fair high for me, there were some red flags for the poor writing that would end up rearing its ugly head, but I'm used to overlooking these things from amateur writers. But, wow, some of these scenes can drag on insanely long, and there's no way to skip them.
In one case, I'm sat here tapping 'enter' for what feels like an entire minute just to skip through an extremely long sex scene that I don't care about that then immediately repeats itself in its own sex scene.
This nearly single-handedly killed the game for me. The game scripted in the ability to hide the message window, even open a history, but no working skip function?
However, I wouldn't have had to skip the dialogue if it wasn't for the...
4. Poor Writing
Settle down, because this might be a long one. Spoilers here, but I wouldn’t worry about spoilers when the screenshots on the OP literally have one of the ending sex scenes.
As I said earlier, things started out rocky, but mostly okay. One of the more powerful elements was what the game didn’t show in the character of ‘Tori’, and how you could get a sneak peek at her status through the RPG menus. The ‘attack’ on the home town of the primary characters was overall handled well, but I really wish the justification for the party going along with their attackers as handled better.
Now this is an NTR game. I'm not a big NTR fan, but I'm a huge fan of female characters becoming corrupted and undergoing character arcs where they go from being pure/moral to immoral. And I'm not even that picky about how it happens, it just needs to be believable. Which means this game in theory should have a lot going for me.
You’re given the most pathetic maggot of a main character to control. This massively detracts from the NTR aspect, because I can’t relate to the protagonist at all, I’m not a tenth as pathetic as he is, so I don’t feel the same burns he does. Nor do I feel particularly sympathetic for the guy as all he does is whine and sob, although major respect for how brave he was when trying to rescue Aina. But the story almost doesn’t seem to recognize just how courageous and brave the main character was, and what you thought may have become a character arc for him, ends up with him just being as pathetic as ever. You could justify that he doesn’t have much choice as his life circumstances constantly beat him down, but there’s a lot more to it.
Because of the protagonist being so unrelatable, it’s very easy to not view this as an NTR game, but just yet another dark game where bad things happen to girls. This one just happens to have some faceless guy in the corner that has a few lines of dialogue saying ‘uuu, uuu’ afterwards, and it honestly lessens the impact of a lot of scenes.
Then we have the female characters, and except for Aina and Krimina, they’re all toxic, and awful people- but I really don’t think they’re supposed to be. I just think the writer wasn’t successful in making them likable characters that you genuinely want to root for. The writer clearly had a few good ideas at first, particularly with Tori and Lotia, but eventually it just feels like one of those mediocre hentais where all the characters fuck because – of course they do, it’s a hentai! Tori and Lotia suddenly just become sex addicts out of nowhere, and for no good justification. In one of the most dumbass moves in the entire fucking game, Lotia challenges Thrash, the ‘Chad’ character that is trying to get with her, into four separate ‘sex’ battles to prove she doesn’t want to have… sex with him? Is Lotia… retarded? How am I supposed to view that as a reader? I suddenly don’t care about Lotia, or what she does, because she’s just gone and proven herself to be so beyond stupid and saving, that I’ve lost all investment in her as a character. I don’t care what happens to her at all now. And then we have this ridiculous arc where the game kinda contorts itself into such a way where it can manufacture a situation where Lotia can no longer ‘trust’ the main character only spiralled my disbelief at the dumbassery further. I might hate Lotia at this point, more than I hate Thrash. At least I understand Thrash, and his motivations. But Lotia? I have no fucking clue, she absolutely failed at her role of being the ‘main NTR’ character.
While Lotia is failing doing the only thing she was written to do, Tori also continuously makes the dumbest decisions she possibly could. One of the very first things she does is get raped, then the morning after she agrees to go on an adventure with her rapist, and that night continues to get raped. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? A little later the game kind of tries to justify this as the village ‘sold’ Tori to these bandits. I don’t know if I forgot but, I don’t think that’s what happened at all? Pretty sure Tori decided to go with them on her own accord for the sake of Lotia. The moment she does, it completely seals her fate as a character, she just becomes a boring sex object with no personality beyond having sex and wanting sex. We don’t feel her struggle, or her turmoil. She never bonds or has a moment with the main character to explore her frustrations and how she’s feeling.
There are so many missed opportunities for character development that is absolutely required for both Tori and Lotia to work, and their characters to be justified, and it just never happens. I don’t for one second believe that either of these characters are ‘real’ beyond being characters designed to be in sex scenes in a hentai game, and it’s an NTR game for god’s sake. The relationship between a strong main character and female characters needs to be the absolute core for that. You want the players to feel that feeling of dread as you hang the threat of these characters meeting misfortune over their head. But this game was so eager to jump straight into the bombastic sex that it never gave you an opportunity to get to explore the characters, or their motives.
Why does Tori keep having sex? Because that’s what’s required of her for this story to work.
Why does Lotia have sex with Thrash? Because that’s what’s required of her for this story to work.
And I don’t think these characters are supposed to be this stupid, unlikable, and flawed, it would be antithetical to good story writing to give them such flimsy, sometimes non-existent motives. I think the game really expected us to see this and take it as face value as their ‘corruption’, but it never earned it, and the sex scenes only get worse as all meaning is lost as it becomes the equivalent to browsing a random image gallery on nhentai, with x10 the clicking between pages.
And we can take this two steps further.
Why does Aina act so overconfident and try to fight an army of bandits that caused someone stronger than her to evacuate, and an entire town to hide? Because the story required that she lose to get raped. We needed to see scenes of her being cocky prior to this, perhaps to her detriment, so a pivotal plot point of the entire game rests on believable character motives.
Why does Krimina continue to fuck the bandits under the guise of ‘we won’t rape the others if you let us rape you’, while the others are getting raped anyway? You’d think maybe if she cared enough to get raped in their place, she’d want to CONFIRM the others aren’t getting raped anyway? Like fucking come on, this game has one character in the entire game that has a motive for the consensual sex scene and it isn’t even followed through?
The game spends such a long time emphasising how bad the main character’s life is, showing us so many scenes of him alone with his shitty life. But what for? I’m not here for him, I’m not masturbating to that guy. Every scene spent alone with this guy should have been time spend developing characters and deepening their relationships.
If the game could be rewritten to Tori and Lotia more time and development, this game could absolutely fucking destroy your emotions if it wanted. The power this game could hold over your heart is palpable. It could have given ‘torture porn’ a whole new meaning. But… this isn’t that game.
After the game is over. It’s time for ‘revenge’. You’ll get the opportunity to turn back all the misery inflicted upon you by the other characters in the game. You’ll have a series of vague, non-specific choices that can lead to six different endings. It’s really annoying to guess how these endings are going to go, spare one random guy in one ending and you’ll somehow get the ending where you hook up with the Dragon girl. The choices and the ending you get are extremely random. It’s so convoluted that there’s literally a guide on how to get them all in the game. Really wish they found a better way to deliver this content rather than forcing you to fuck around with saves.
The game tries to get really ‘deep’ at the end, as two pseudo-gods that I suppose were kinda foreshadowed, begin a philosophical debate on whether a world of hedonism and passion is preferred over a world of without love and passion. Making implications that almost all violence and hate comes from humans having passions. Which is admittedly a good place to start writing an interesting story…
But yes, they manage to fuck up even this part of the story too, it was just forced in at the end rather than having the gradual build-up it needed. These weren’t ‘themes’ of the game that came up in several conversations, no, all this is dropped in you in the last 10 minutes, and only in specific endings.
And finally, at its worst, the game not only has themes of encouraging toxic relationships, but also defends rapists at times. Like, “Oh! He’s raped tons of people, and abused me, but he’s a good guy!”. Uh, okay?
The story gets an easy 1/5. By far the biggest missed opportunity of the entire game.
5. The Bare Minimum:
This game did the bare minimum everywhere apart from that mentioned above. Basic RPGmaker tiles, and extremely few custom NPCs. But even default RPGMaker assets can go further than this game. The main town is a perfect example of how NOT to do a main town. It’s overly large, boxy, and empty. There’s nothing to do here except walk from one end to the other, and it takes way too long. It’s evident that whoever designed them does not have a good eye for map design or aesthetic.
At one point you can walk into a bar, it’s a boring rectangle with no art direction, and LITERALLY all 10+ NPCs in there use the same model. I didn’t even bother talking to them, but I doubt their dialogue would have been much more interesting, because no NPC ever had anything stimulating to say. It could have been a great opportunity to add some character to the game, some lore, some worldbuilding, some easter eggs. But this game had so little personality.
And personality is absolutely what a game like these needs. Anyone reading this played LonaRPG? Now that is a game that matches the visuals with the aesthetic. Dark, grimy, gross feeling game. You just can’t get that using basic RPGmaker assets. No effort was put into lighting the maps, and I’m pretty sure that would have been possible, and could have gone a long way because for some reason the game is just perpetually extremely bright daytime. Certainly kills the ‘crime-ridden city’ aesthetic they seem to be going for.
6. Outdated Engine:
This game was released in 2015 but still uses an older, clunky RPGMaker engine with poor functionality. I can excuse this slightly, since RPGMaker MV was only out for 5 months prior to the release of this game. (Although this game isn’t 5 months of work, I can confidently say that.)
